Columns

People in our community continue to ask me how they can help with the homeless here. There’s so much you can do – from donations to volunteering to just offering respect – to make a homeless person’s life a little bit better.
If you are one of the lucky ones, the world of a homeless person is completely foreign from your own. But without the support of friends and family, how many of us could survive something such as the loss of a spouse, a debilitating physical illness or the loss of employment?

Since it secured the Volvo manufacturing plant in July 2015, the state has been celebrating its achievement with promises of stellar economic growth and thousands of jobs for the Berkeley County area.
A spokesman for Berkeley County was asked if taxpayers would be feeling any effects from Berkeley’s multimillion-dollar investment. He responded, “I think the effect they’re going to feel is a lot of jobs coming to Berkeley County.”

Fake news. It’s a phrase that became the most memorable takeaway from the 2016 election and the political hangover that still resonates today.
It should come as no surprise that Oxford Dictionaries proclaimed the 2016 word of the year to be “post-truth,” an appropriate adjective for an era in which some news consumers are less concerned with whether or not something is true than they are with how it makes them feel.

In the Chinese language, the symbol is the same for crisis and opportunity. For both the state of South Carolina and for the Democratic Party – this truly is a time of both crisis and opportunity.

First our state’s crisis. Anyone who reads a newspaper knows our state is at the beginning of a political corruption and ethics crisis the likes of which we have not seen in a generation. And add to this the huge, related $9 billion nuclear scandal with SCANA, Santee Cooper and the legislature.

There are two important lessons we can learn from Hurricane Irma: One, that we as a nation possess remarkable resolve when faced with adversity. And two, that we offer too much praise to government leaders who are simply doing their job.

How often have you had that conversation with your neighbor? The one where you shake your head and wonder aloud about what this community needs to get back on the right path?
What if I told you that the path is right in front of us, and that together we can build the vibrant future that Lancaster deserves?

When your tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, you have a problem.
Our current federal tax code is simply not benefiting American families. As I’ve said for far too long, Washington does not have an income problem, it has a spending problem.

Most reactions to the march by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., last month condemned the marchers, their message and their use of swastikas, chants and Nazi imagery. But there were also questions about why they were allowed to hold their march and spread their vile message of hate.
The latter question is just one of the latest examples of a recent trend in which some are asking whether certain groups and individuals should be permitted to express views that offend others.

There’s been a devastating trail of destruction and flooding in the last few weeks following Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. The latter was the strongest sustained hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic outside the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

Suppose you had next-door neighbors who, year after year, did not adequately feed their children or provide them health care.
And suppose that you regularly talked with your neighbor and showed them how they were not measuring up, and told them there were resources available to help them do better.
But after many years, their kids were still worse off than over 80 percent of the other kids in the neighborhood.
Would you call this systematic “child abuse?” Well, thus is the status of children in South Carolina.